The Scopes Monkey Trial: Darwin in The Dock

On 21, July, after just 9 minutes of deliberation the Jury brought in a verdict of guilty. John T Scopes avoided imprisonment and was instead ordered to pay $100 as a fine by Judge Raulston. It was the minimal permissible punishment. After his sentence Scopes addressed the Court, “I feel I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can.” But Scopes had no intention of paying the fine. Darrow still determined to make the case a Constitutional issue would appeal the sentence. Bryan was furious at the sentence, he had demanded at least a term of imprisonment. Having not been permitted to give a closing address to the Court he now embarked upon a speaking tour to make his point. In the meantime, the sentence was appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee which overturned the decision on a technicality. They stated that it was for the Jury to establish the size of the fine, not the Judge.

Neither Darrow or Bryan achieved their aims in The Monkey Trial. Bryan did not manage to create the great moral cleansing in the education of America’s children that he had envisaged. Though, in the immediate wake of the trial more States in the South tried to force through their legislatures anti-evolution laws, and two, Alabama and Mississippi did. Darrow had failed to in his attempt to prove that it was unconstitutional for individual States to legislate against the teaching of evolution, and it was not until 1968 that the United States Supreme Court finally ruled against it.

William Jennings Bryan had returned to Dayton after his short speaking tour during which he had tried to restore his damaged reputation. On 26 July, just six days after the trial had ended, he died. He had taken a nap after having eaten a large meal. He lapsed into a coma and never regained consciousness. Clarence Darrow, having been told that Bryan had died of a broken heart responded, “Hell did he! He died of a busted belly.” Though he soon after tempered this remark by saying that the country had lost a great American.

Clarence Darrow died in Chicago on 13 March, 1938, aged 80. America’s most celebrated lawyer had continued to fight high-profile court cases until near his final demise. But perhaps his most famous case was The Scopes Monkey Trial. Yet for all the bluster and hot air it decided little, and the arguments aired in that hot, steamy courtroom in a small Tennessee town, continue to resonate, conflict and divide to this day.